4 ms·

Their definition of "free" is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share link

by morninj 12y ago

Their definition of "free" is interesting. Only paid subscribers can search for articles, and apparently others can view articles only if subscribers share links with them. For many purposes, articles might be "free" but still hidden from the public.

stephentmcm 12y ago
So how long until someone writes a web crawler that dumps all the links into a searchable public db?
- qq66 12y ago
  The public link is probably coded to each subscriber, so they would be able to identify the culprit and disable all the links from that subscriber.
  - selmnoo 12y ago
    Hah, come on. :) That's not a very high barrier. A 'pirate' simply has to get a throwaway account (or steal one, if he's truly bad) and he doesn't even have to worry about that. I expect all Nature articles made "free" today to be available on TPB in one month. I'll put .1 BTC on it. :)
    - eru 12y ago
      What odds?
  - morninj 12y ago
    As soon as a link is shared, each person who learns the URL is potentially a "culprit."
    - jpatokal 12y ago
      Not if the URL encodes the originator of the link, and all links tied to that user stop working when Nature flips a switch. But regardless of what DRM scheme they choose, it's doomed to fail, all it takes is one person to crack the scheme and liberate the underlying documents. Alternatively, since 100 anointed blogs and media outlets will apparently have the right to download raw PDFs, all it takes is for one of their accounts to get hacked.
      - eru 12y ago
        Don't you have that problem already?
- xaa 12y ago
  The data needed for searching (titles, abstracts, and other metadata), at least for biology-related articles, is already available in an XML dump from NIH. The public interface is called PubMed, so you can already search for Nature articles, just not within full text. I have actually tried to do what you are suggesting before, so I could bulk-download PDFs (I have an institutional subscription). The problem is that the URLs are different for every journal, and some have Javascript that makes automated downloading hard. Since there are thousands of journals, it's very tedious to try to invent a generalized solution.
- skosuri 12y ago
  This has already been done many times with regular pdfs [1-3]. There are mostly hosted illegally in places like Russia. I'm sure you can find more on TPB or similar. [1] http://sci-hub.org/ http://sci-hub.org/ [2] http://booksc.org/ http://booksc.org/ [3] http://www.freefullpdf.com/ http://www.freefullpdf.com/
  - lqdc13 12y ago
    Unfortunately, these don't host many of the articles I would love to have access to. If I didn't know anyone still in uni, I would probably have no way of doing good research. Looks like one of them is proxying through a university that has access though.
    - skosuri 12y ago
      You can also try /r/scholar; you usually get responses within a day or so [1]. [1]. http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar
    - nisa 12y ago
      sci-hub never let me down. It may take a while but it's quite effective.
    - Kiro 12y ago
      How much is a subscription?
  - msutherl 12y ago
    See also: http://libgen.org http://libgen.org and http://aaaaarg.org/ http://aaaaarg.org/
therzathegza 12y ago
Most searching for articles is done via PubMed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed Nature gets seen side by side with free access journals there, and so now we get to see them for free (regardless of delivery mechanism). It likely doesn't matter what Hacker News thinks about this. Our impression of free, say github style open source free is otherworldly different than Nature's free: paywall, peer reviewed, exclusive, ultra prestige. Tomorrow there will be celebrations in my old lab about how amazing this is.

by morninj 12y ago

stephentmcm 12y ago

So how long until someone writes a web crawler that dumps all the links into a searchable public db?

qq66 12y ago
The public link is probably coded to each subscriber, so they would be able to identify the culprit and disable all the links from that subscriber.
- selmnoo 12y ago
  Hah, come on. :) That's not a very high barrier. A 'pirate' simply has to get a throwaway account (or steal one, if he's truly bad) and he doesn't even have to worry about that. I expect all Nature articles made "free" today to be available on TPB in one month. I'll put .1 BTC on it. :)
  - eru 12y ago
    What odds?
- morninj 12y ago
  As soon as a link is shared, each person who learns the URL is potentially a "culprit."
  - jpatokal 12y ago
    Not if the URL encodes the originator of the link, and all links tied to that user stop working when Nature flips a switch. But regardless of what DRM scheme they choose, it's doomed to fail, all it takes is one person to crack the scheme and liberate the underlying documents. Alternatively, since 100 anointed blogs and media outlets will apparently have the right to download raw PDFs, all it takes is for one of their accounts to get hacked.
    - eru 12y ago
      Don't you have that problem already?
xaa 12y ago
The data needed for searching (titles, abstracts, and other metadata), at least for biology-related articles, is already available in an XML dump from NIH. The public interface is called PubMed, so you can already search for Nature articles, just not within full text. I have actually tried to do what you are suggesting before, so I could bulk-download PDFs (I have an institutional subscription). The problem is that the URLs are different for every journal, and some have Javascript that makes automated downloading hard. Since there are thousands of journals, it's very tedious to try to invent a generalized solution.
skosuri 12y ago
This has already been done many times with regular pdfs [1-3]. There are mostly hosted illegally in places like Russia. I'm sure you can find more on TPB or similar. [1] http://sci-hub.org/ http://sci-hub.org/ [2] http://booksc.org/ http://booksc.org/ [3] http://www.freefullpdf.com/ http://www.freefullpdf.com/
- lqdc13 12y ago
  Unfortunately, these don't host many of the articles I would love to have access to. If I didn't know anyone still in uni, I would probably have no way of doing good research. Looks like one of them is proxying through a university that has access though.
  - skosuri 12y ago
    You can also try /r/scholar; you usually get responses within a day or so [1]. [1]. http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar
  - nisa 12y ago
    sci-hub never let me down. It may take a while but it's quite effective.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    How much is a subscription?
- msutherl 12y ago
  See also: http://libgen.org http://libgen.org and http://aaaaarg.org/ http://aaaaarg.org/

therzathegza 12y ago

Most searching for articles is done via PubMed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed Nature gets seen side by side with free access journals there, and so now we get to see them for free (regardless of delivery mechanism). It likely doesn't matter what Hacker News thinks about this. Our impression of free, say github style open source free is otherworldly different than Nature's free: paywall, peer reviewed, exclusive, ultra prestige. Tomorrow there will be celebrations in my old lab about how amazing this is.